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I said, "down the road"

I only wanted to point out that rather than try to catch a relatively small market segments in America and the west,(with a console) Valve could very well have its eye on a substantially larger pie. Currently, the only native OS in China that I'm aware of is a Linux Distro, so, were I Chinese, I would support the local stuff - just like as a Pennsylvanian, I drink Yuengling Lager (although I currently work, spread the Open Source Gospel, and reside in the Republic of Korea (S.Korea)).

Valve, in preparation for entering that market in a few years (guess??), might be adding Linux support if only for the reason that that market may have a significant number or Linux users by that time. Also, who knows whether or not, 5 yrs from now, the Loongson chip family wouldn't be running on the majority of Chinese Desktops? Reguardless of Loongson, the OS being used alone is the big kicker. And not just China but a lot of places in the world outside of Europe, U.S., etc, are running Linux distros and as they are newer to the computer field, Linux has a better chance to establish itself in those markets.

It was only speculation, and I certainly meant no hatred - do head crabs not consume all humans equally?

I only wanted to point out that rather than try to catch a relatively small market segments in America and the west,(with a console) Valve could very well have its eye on a substantially larger pie. Currently, the only native OS in China that I'm aware of is a Linux Distro, so, were I Chinese, I would support the local stuff - just like as a Pennsylvanian, I drink Yuengling Lager (although I currently work, spread the Open Source Gospel, and reside in the Republic of Korea (S.Korea)).

Valve, in preparation for entering that market in a few years (guess??), might be adding Linux support if only for the reason that that market may have a significant number or Linux users by that time. Also, who knows whether or not, 5 yrs from now, the Loongson chip family wouldn't be running on the majority of Chinese Desktops? Reguardless of Loongson, the OS being used alone is the big kicker. And not just China but a lot of places in the world outside of Europe, U.S., etc, are running Linux distros and as they are newer to the computer field, Linux has a better chance to establish itself in those markets.

It was only speculation, and I certainly meant no hatred - do head crabs not consume all humans equally?

ok now I see your point, but valve probably wouldn't make as much money from china as you may expect. I'm not sure if any of valves products, even steam for that matter, are even translated to Chinese. They might be I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if there are enough people in china wealthy enough to get into Valve products. While the population is immense, many of Chinese people would be considered severely povershed by western nation standards. That being said, they wouldn't generate enough revenue. China is also a huge piracy nation.

In a hardware perspective, you're basically implying that MIPS, which IMO is of the lowest performing modern desktop CPU architectures, will end up being not only popular enough but powerful enough to compete with today's x86 processors. For now, valve is probably taking this 1 step at a time and making sure that they can get steam working on Linux in general. MIPS is probably a lower priority than ARM for valve, and I don't see them getting into ARM in the next few years. Today, china is probably more focused on VIA's systems (rather than MIPS), which are x86 based and they have pretty terrible Linux support.

re

As far as I know China has a respectable sized middle class. Although you are correct there are a lot more poor than not. However, I've heard that China has more rich upper class citizens than america has citizens, period.

I also agree with you that for the foreseeable future, Loongson wont be very impressive. I certainly will be sticking with x86 over any of the other platforms. But radical shifts can and do happen in the technology world. Something that has perceived value today may not tomorrow. Something now comical may become an essential business tool. You never know...

As for Valve games ans Chinese Language support, the Half Life games all have Chinese Language support. Neither Portal game has it though. (i was trying to run my steam catalogue in Korean and saw tons of languages for the HL games, including both traditional and modern chinese support..though I suspect that it is used by Chinese speaking US residents and citizens).

Im also unsure what kind of political hurdles Valve might face releasing steam in China. Its doing fair in Russia and S.Korea though.

If you would read up on how chinese firewall and all those media clone sites work, you will realise that in many places china versions offer much more freedom; there are only several things protected and they are all about politics.

Have you ever been in China and seen the effects personally?

I haven't, so i can't really say anything for sure, but I know people who have, and they tell me that it's a real annoyance. Lots of websites they try to use (which generally have nothing to do with politics) get blocked. Most likely because of some keyword that just shows up in a comment some where or other on the page, and it's auto-blocked. Of course i imagine that's more of a problem for foreigners trying to access their foreign-language sites - it's likely less of an issue for native Chinese, especially since they've grown up with the system and know how to work around it.

But I think you're mistaken to just pass it off as nothing that any other government doesn't also do. The Chinese system is different from what western countries do.

I am willing to move to a MIPS processor in the future, however, it would be great to know the advantages/disadvantages.
As I am using Debian, the move would be simple I assume, as a lot of common packages would be readily available.

Putting gpu stuff aside, Maybe the entire stable release of MIPS is available but we all know how ancient that is, in Linux years anyway. I'm sure a lot of Sid or wheezy is available for MIPS but I'm sure it breaks more often than x86 or ARM. But, just because all, or most of Debian is available, it doesn't mean that has everything you need.

An informal count based on this reveals the following binary package numbers in Debian Wheezy:

mipsel: 35643
amd64: 36503

So you have more than 97% of Debian packages available on mipsel compared to amd64. Including many that require OpenGL.

It could be that the packages are out-of-date or compile but don't run, however a quick search at the bugtracker doesn't turn up bug reports in numbers which would significantly affect the above result.

Originally Posted by schmidtbag

There are plenty of packages that Debian doesn't offer on any platform, and not all of them are MIPS compatible.

There is a lot to complain about Debian, but the lack of software choice ain't among it. In fact the debian-mipsel package count beats every other x86 distro out there.

Originally Posted by schmidtbag

In the open source world, just about anything can be ported but it doesn't mean someone has.

I am willing to move to a MIPS processor in the future, however, it would be great to know the advantages/disadvantages.
As I am using Debian, the move would be simple I assume, as a lot of common packages would be readily available.

how good does x264 and webm work on such quad or manycore cpus as example the 4core is there some gpu acceleration or is the cpu better in doing that.

I hate in on my zacate systems that 120% of the cpu is used (1core + 20% of the second core) for gstreamer based movie apps (totem / minitube...) so that browsing and other stuff really gets slow when I have a video on some other screen. I mean yes a i7 is much faster than this mips chips no question but if you want a powersaving machine, like a zacate I think it should be close or because of the 4 cores maybe the loongsons are even faster?

Its at least impressive what they do with a crappy shit 100 year old 65nm process. would nice to see a 32core 22nm version of that, and that could be very cheep, and also still in <50Watts.

GPUs are useless, they get maybe usefull drivers (I mean except basic drawing of the screen and a year2000 opengl 1.3 deskop acceleration speed...) when nobody use them anymore... if even than...

hope cpus can become better, because gpus failed because the impossibility to write proper software for it...

and yes even if amd would release finaly good opensource drivers, like as example intel does at least for some gpus (some do support hardware accelerated video encoding, so for the user this gpus are stronger and the intel cpus are stronger anyway)... they would not commit to openbios and such stuff... so I really love that stuff, and if it is fast enough fro me, minitube and browser and movies without having all cores involved do work with that and its somewhat power efficient I will switch to that. even if the x86 alternatives would be theoreticaly stronger in some wether-calculations or 3d games... with proprietary drivers.